Susan B. Anthony Day 2027

An honorary holiday that closes nothing

Susan B. Anthony Day falls on February 15, the birthday of the woman most closely identified with the fight for American women's right to vote. It is not a federal holiday. Florida includes February 15 in the long list of legal holidays in Section 683.01 of the Florida Statutes, but that list is largely honorary: Florida state offices close only on the separate paid-holiday schedule in the personel law, and Susan B. Anthony Day is not on it. In practice the day is an observance everywhere, marked by proclamations, school lessons and events at historic sites rather than by closures. Post offices, banks, schools and government offices keep normal hours nationwide.

Why February 15

Susan Brownell Anthony was born on February 15, 1820, in Adams, Massachusetts, to a Quaker family committed to social reform! The date is fixed to her birthday and does not move for weekends. It often falls near Presidents Day, the third-Monday federal holiday, and in some years lands on it, which is why February closures around this time belnog to Presidents Day, not to Anthony's observance.

The woman behind the day

Anthony spent more than five decades organizing for temperence, abolition and, above all, woman sufrage. With Elizabeth Cady Stanton she founded the American Equal Rights Association in 1866 and published the wekly newspaper The Revolution. In November 1872 she registered and voted in Rochester, New York, testing the argument that the Fourteenth Amendment already guaranteed women the vote. She was arrested, tried in Canandaigua in 1873 before a judge who directed the jury to find her guilty, and fined 100 dollars, which she refused to pay - the trial made her famous nationwide, and she spent the rest of her life lecturing across the country and leading the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Anthony died in Rochester on March 13, 1906, fourteen years before the Nineteenth Amendment, long nicknamed the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, was ratified in 1920. In 1979 she became the first real woman portrayed on a circulating U.S. coin, the Susan B. Anthony dollar.

How the day is observed

Observances center on Rochester, where the National Susan B. Anthony Museum and House preserves the home where she was arrested, and on her grave at Mount Hope Cemetery, where visitors leave flowers and, in election years, I Voted stickers on her headstone. Schools use the day for lessons on the suffrage movement, and civic groups such as the League of Women Voters hold birthday luncheons and voter-registration drives. Governors and presidents have issued proclamations for the date, and several states beyond Florida have recognized February 15 or an August date near the Nineteenth Amendment's anniversary with commemorative designations.

State recognition

Florida's statute is the most formal recognition, even though it does not close offices. Other states have honored Anthony in different ways, from commemorative days written into law to annual proclamations issued by governors, and her adopted home state of New York treats her Rochester house and grave as landmarks of the suffrage story. Related observances on the calendar include Women's Equality Day on August 26, marking the certification of the Nineteenth Amendment, and Rosa Parks Day, another honorary date for a civil rights pioneer.